SPECIAL REPORT: The tenants of Brockton's 'Tent City'

Brockton's homeless survive in crude circumstances just steps from civilization. First of two parts.

Benjamin Paulin The Patriot Ledger @BPaulin_Ledger

Julie yawned as she poked her head out of her tent in the warm morning air. She pushed a tarp to the side and crawled out as she stretched her arms behind her head.

Following close behind her out of the tent was her mother.

Her mother lit a cigarette as the two began to chat for a couple minutes.

“I gotta go to the store and get a beer,” she told her daughter. “Mama’s gotta get rid of these shakes.”

As Julie, who is 28, sat down next to the fire pit, her mother spritzed herself with perfume and picked up a broken shard of a mirror and looked into it as she brushed her hair.

The two then walked up a steep dirt embankment that leads up to the commuter rail train tracks and toward North Montello Street.

Julie and her mother live in a tent inside a 31-acre tract of densely wooded land behind North Montello, Elliot and North Cary streets in Brockton. The land is owned by Consolidated Railroad Corp., based in Philadelphia.

For dozens of homeless men and women in Brockton, the area is home.

They call it “Tent City.”

A reporter and photographer from The Enterprise spent time in Tent City starting in May, and were back this past week. The people living there – those who were willing to talk – spoke of how they live and sometimes struggle to survive in their outdoor life.

Many were unwilling to disclose their first or last names for this story. Julie did not want to give her last name and her mother did not want to disclose her name at all. There are many reasons why the people did not want to be identified, embarrassment and debt among them.

Tent City is a scatter of Brockton’s hidden homeless. Some live by themselves; others congregate together in small camps.

Julie and her mother have lived in Tent City on and off for the past five years. Each morning they wake up to the sound of birds chirping, the rumbling of the commuter rail train and the loud clangor of a nearby scrap metal business.

“I was living in Halifax but my grandmother sold her house and I have no place to go so I ended up out here and I can’t find a job,” Julie said. Julie said she lived at first at the Elmcourt Hotel in downtown Brockton. “It was cheap,” she said.

Once she ran out of money, she tried going to the MainSpring House homeless shelter on Main Street. The nightly overflow of men and women at the shelter made her uneasy. On average, MainSpring has about 115 people sleep at the shelter each night. The shelter receives funding from the state for 51 beds per night.

“There’s so many homeless people out here it’s ridiculous,” Julie said. “If every homeless person went into the shelter they wouldn’t have enough room. Because I’ve gone in there and had to sleep on a mattress on the floor. The men, they have to sleep on mats on the floor.”

She eventually found her way to Tent City where she now shares a tent with four other people, including her mother.

In the tent next to Julie’s lives Derek Hayward.

Derek has been homeless for the last 10 years and has been living in Tent City on and off for five or six years. Like many in Tent City, he said he suffers from mental health issues.

Derek, 29, is originally from South Boston but said he has lived all over the country including California, Arkansas, Florida and Maine. Locally he’s lived in Whitman and Avon.

“I’ve been all over,” he said.

Derek’s tent is protected by several worn and tattered tarps tied to trees. Local church groups stop by every couple of months to drop tents and tarps off to those living in the woods.

A clothesline hangs between two nearby trees and it is covered with jackets, blankets, T-shirts and pants. Piles of discarded and moldy clothes, garbage, food wrappers, empty bottles and old mattresses litter the ground around the tents.

Leaves on the ground have been cleared away and several large stones were gathered in a circle to make a fire pit. They burn wooden pallets, blocks of wood from the nearby unused train tracks and trash to provide light and warmth at night.

Derek does not have a job. He and his friend, who goes by the name Filthy Rich, collect scrap metal throughout the city and bring it to scrap yards to earn cash.

It’s an arduous effort for the small amount of money they receive.

“I come out here and scrap up, try to make money,” said Derek. “Iron, steel, copper, aluminum, tin, pretty much any metal you can get a hold of. A 200-pound pile is probably like $13, $15.”

Derek said Tent City was a scrap metal yard decades ago. They dig metal out of the ground and load it into shopping carts then haul it to ECO Recycling Systems on Mulberry Street, about a half-mile away.

“We go around, pick up the metal in the hills and just try to survive,” said the man who called himself Filthy Rich. He said he is 36 and he lives in Tent City about 100 yards from Derek’s camp.

Derek and Filthy Rich split the money they earn and use it to buy cigarettes, beer and other things they may need at the time.

To get food, they walk over to MainSpring, which offers three meals a day, including three serving times at lunch.

Derek goes to Mainspring more often than Filthy Rich, who has an uncle who lives in the city and sometimes lets him shower and watch TV at his apartment.

To get to the shelter, Derek walks up the dirt embankment towards the track. He walks over the active commuter rail tracks to an opening in the fence at the back of a building on North Montello Street.

Through the fence is a small alleyway in between two abandoned buildings. The alley is littered with discarded garbage and broken glass. Someone leaned several mattresses against the building for them to take if they need one.

Once at MainSpring, there are usually more than 20 people in line outside waiting to get in. The shelter serves hot meals and also hands out bagged lunches and food for people to take with them on their way out.

None of the people at Tent City or MainSpring said they wanted to be in the situation they are in. Many people who live in Tent City suffer from mental issues and addiction to drugs and alcohol. And it can be a dangerous and sometimes deadly life to live.

On April 15, Barry Thomas, a homeless man, died of liver failure while lying on the sidewalk on North Main Street.

On April 26, Danny Rivard, 39 and also homeless, was struck and killed by a commuter rail train.

On May 5, a homeless couple living in the woods behind Mulberry Street burned to death when their charcoal grill tipped over onto their tent.

Even though there are resources available to them, a lot of times they don’t know where to begin.

“How am I going to get the confidence back to go out for a job if I can’t even get my teeth cleaned or glasses?” Filthy Rich asked.

“We need something to give us hope. We have us, together, living every day and then we go to bed and we wake up then next day and do it all over again, he said. “Where’s the hope?”